More to the point, a lot of this feels like nonsense. The problem is that this story is heavily rooted in reality (at least, this universe's version of reality, IE not dreams). Yet a lot of the logic and the way the story hinges its drama and tension on feel very ungrounded and disorienting. It made it incredibly hard to follow, but more importantly, it felt boring. I can't care about this, or the fact that Paul Is Dead was a thing the Foundation wrote up (especially how contrived it all is in-universe).

It feels like you wanted to take a real-world concept and intertwine it with Foundation lore. And then that gets tied into the 012 reference this storyline hinges on. And I have no problem with 012 being used in tales; I loved the journals. But this rockets the whole concept for me straight into inplausibility. I got everything that went on here, it just feels way too heavy for what this story can carry, and comes off absurd as a result.

I feel like I didn't keep track of the conversation very well, but it was pretty thrilling for what it is. That Paul McCartney EX is fun, too. I don't get the ARG thing at all, but I'm sure some smart cookie will figure it out and I can enjoy it in hindsight. This at least stands on its own for an upvote.

There doesn't appear to be anything hidden in the ID3 tags of the MP3, including "hidden" (PRIV) tags that take extra effort to view,

The file is approximately the correct size for its bitrate and length, meaning it's somewhat less likely that there's an additional file "wrapped" inside of it somewhere.

The words are to "I Am The Walrus", and appear to be all correct (except for a few times where the "goo goo g'joob"s don't quite match up)

If there's something hidden there, it's not in those places. However, there's a lot of places to hide data in an MP3: between frames (the blocks that make up the MP3), with various encoding tricks, etc.

If anybody who knows more about audio wants to play with this, please go ahead. A few things to try that I can't do on my work computer:

"More popular than Jesus," Roger corrected. Realization passed over his face. "Oh. Oh, Rita. Listen, have you got the Twelve documentation? Show me the full record. I'm still cleared for it, no amnesiacs, remember?"

Roger calls Emma Rita here. This is a strange enough story I'm not entirely sure it is a mistake.

I was a little iffy on this (partly because I was having trouble following the logic around the dead/alive/explained/neutralised stuff, and partly because Emma seems quite a weak character here) but this comment about the 012 file turned it around entirely:

How many people have read that? How many have loved it? Does it deserve that love? Does that document deserve so much attention? And how many want nothing more than to rewrite it? They know how to fix it. They know how to complete it. And yet, they cannot.

That is meta-textual gold, right there. I am a sucker for taking wiki-facts and creating in-universe fiction, and this is a great use of that trope to drive forward the story. Which, in turn, improves the skip … that no-one can resist trying to improve. Neat.

Thank you! That's been one of the most ironic aspects of SCP-012 for me. It's about a bunch of people who think they can complete something but cannot, in an article that everyone wants to complete, but cannot.